Tom Baker is never better than when he has a moral crusade to deliver and his insistence in the final episode that human history is not meddled with sees him deliver some of his best work for ages.īobby on the Beat: Ann is curiously muted in the first episode of this story, even piping up at one point to point out who she is and if anyone cares. He was mistaken for a God because of it and he was suddenly, inadvertently responsible for a great legend. He designed a labyrinth once by mistake, it was just a doodle really. The Doctor is beguiled by the Countess on her reputation alone. These 4DAs often seem to rambled on without a sense of purpose and it kicks off this story with a feeling of drive. I like the idea of the Doctor and Ann being on a mission from the get-go. Teeth and Curls: Never let it be said that the TARDIS isn’t at least 50% more reliable than a coach. What do they want with Ada? And how will it change the future of humanity? Something odd is happening on Earth, and they’ve determined that this place is the centre of it.

But the travellers are not here by chance. Mistaken for a medic and his maid, the Doctor and Ann are brought to meet Ada Lovelace - the mother of computing and daughter of Lord Byron - who has recently fallen ill. Yet, 100 years after Ada expressed the idea, computer scientists developed the modern computer using a similar approach.What’s it About: The TARDIS lands in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, in 1850. The machine was never constructed, so Ada’s theory has not been tested. Ada had many tutors for mathematics and science, including Mary Somerville (1780-1872), the Scottish researcher and scientific author, who introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, who was working on a machine dubbed as the world's first computer.īabbage’s machine only used numbers, but Ada believed these digits could represent other entities, such as music tones and letters. Ada’s mother insisted she receive lessons in maths and science because she feared her daughter becoming an “insane” poet like her husband. The Honorable Augusta Ada Byron was the daughter of Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), the renowned poet and politician. The goal of this event is to “raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths,” particularly those written out of history. In 2009, the non-profit organisation 'The Ada Initiative' marked the second Tuesday of October as the annual Ada Lovelace Day. Generally, but incorrectly, known as Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer is gradually earning recognition in the 21st century.

Augusta Ada King (1815-1882), the Countess of Lovelace, or “The Enchantress of Number”, as the polymath Charles Babbage (1791-1871) called her, went against social norms to study mathematics and receive the accolade of the first computer programmer.

The enchantress of number